Again I find myself with nothing much myeloma-related to write about. Met my activity target with Sunday morning at the Ongar piste - not many people there yesterday and we just played a couple of friendlies. The bowel management plan worked to perfection, and I didn't take a Senna last night in the hope of repeating the performance (or lack of it) later today when I shall be at Epping. That requires leaving a bit earlier - by 09:20 - to be sure of getting there in time for the various teams and lanes to be allocated.
Ankle oedema is still there but not bad enough to make it difficult or impossible to put shoes on. I may try a Furosemide with the lunchtime pills when I get back from Epping, as I have nothing out of the house planned for the rest of the day.
Now for a boules digression. No myeloma content whatsoever, but this blog is about living with myeloma, and petanque has become one of my main ways of doing that successfully.
According to all the best experts, there are two grips for the ball, and there isn't a huge difference between them. No.1 has the ball sitting right back in the fleshy part of the hand.The fingers are curled tightly around the ball, and the thumb is definitely not on the ball, it's resting on the first finger instead.
This can be delivered without then wrist bent fully backwards if you don't want backspin.
The main variation (No.2) has the ball a little further forward in the hand, held by the loosely curved fingers.Thumb off the ball again. It needs the wrist fully cocked backwards, and gives you more backspin than No.1.:
Both grips are good for applying side-spin by rotating the wrist to the right or left .
The trouble is that the more petanque I play, the fewer people I see using these grips in undiluted form. The main deviation is that almost everybody has the thumb resting on the ball - something that is supposed to throw it off-line.
A lot of people I play with (or against) use a grip something like this (No.3):
with the thumb on the ball and balanced by the little finger resting on the other side of the ball. It seems to work well for them...
I've been working on a variation
with first and middle finger in front of the ball, and thumb and ring finger equally spaced behind. The little finger stays off the ball, which feels a lot more natural than keeping the thumb off in Nos 1 & 2. This (No.4) grip seems to offer a lot of variation in backspin from lots with the wrist fully cocked backwards to little or none with a straight wrist. It's good for delivering a high lob (something I often find hard with Nos 1 & 2), and overall I like it rather a lot.
And of course there's also the underhand grip, which I use for shooting at longish range where I can't get a conventional grip to go far enough to pitch on the target ball. Underhand doesn't give any backspin but if you're shooting who cares?
It would probably be a good plan to stick to just one grip and learn to get the best out of it. Just as it would be sensible to have just one set of competition boules and learn how they behave in all circumstances. Needless to say I have rather more than one and there's another (which I seriously hope will be the last for a long time) coming soon. More about them later... It's just not in my nature to keep these things simple, although I admire those who do.
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